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Businesses desperately need people with skills that can make sense of vast oceans of information they are gathering, says V3's US correspondent, Shaun Nichols

As a whole, the IT industry has seen better days. Vendors have seen hardware sales slump, while the slow economic recovery has held back growth and investment in all areas.

Young people are especially feeling the pinch with recent graduates facing high unemployment rates.

And yet, even in these trying times there is a field in the enterprise space which is not only loaded with vacant jobs, but is actively seeking out recent graduates and young people with the specialised skill set needed to operate its sophisticated platforms. This field is that of big data analysis.

The big data sector sprung from a pair of trends which have helped shape the modern IT landscape: virtualisation and the subsequent scale-up to cloud computing.

These two trends have left vendors with the power to create machines which can handle more data at a faster rate than before.

Meanwhile, the data explosion created by the rise of e-commerce and social networking has left executives, administrators and strategists with more data to sift through and make sense of than at any point in history.

With such a massive data pool available, companies have a golden opportunity to harvest data on a far more intricate and precise scale, incorporating factors and input sources which had never been available before.

A lot of this data is unstructured and cannot be catalogued and analysed by a common database infrastructure. Hence, the creation of the big data market.

Massive pools of unstructured information are now stored, organised and analysed by NoSQL databases and the popular open-source Apache Hadoop platform.